About Me

I have worked for the last ten years in open source and peer-to-peer software, both in community projects and tech startups. I founded a number of open source peer-to-peer software projects, including Freenet, Tristero, Alluvium, and Project Snakebite. I've also worked in peer-to-peer Interent video delivery at Swarmcast as Senior Engineer and then at BitTorrent as the Director of Product Management.

I currently have a startup here in Austin called Ringlight, where I make social file-sharing software. I also do some consulting in the areas of product design, product management, and engineering architecture.

Blogs of Note

Saturday, January 29, 2011

It's really amazing how the censorship bar keeps getting raised. When I co-founded Freenet over ten years ago, there were lots of assumptions shared about what online censorship was and how far people would be willing to go and also about what free speech was and what people wanted to communicate online. These assumptions have carried through to the design of today's censorship resistant systems. For instance, Tor still uses SSL we used to think that no one in their right mind would block SSL because then they'd be blocking HTTPS and critical systems such as any online commerce. The essential assumption was that there was a certain level to which censors would not go and we just needed to hide our traffic below that level. This was a good assumption for a long time, but now the game has changed.

Iran was the first wake-up call. They went farther than China was every willing to go by severely throttling SSL specifically. This was really a smart move because it didn't slow down the ability to read pages on the Internet, as most are unencrypted. It did slow down Tor and the ability to log in to any sites that use SSL for logins (hopefully all of them at this point). Since logins are required for most publishing services such as email, Twitter, Facebook, etc., this throttled both the ability to send information out. Of course online commerce was affected, but they were willing to accept that. The Iran attack became the new gold standard in online censorship. All systems need to adapt to this new reality. Since SSL is now a target, SSL is no longer a good wrapper for traffic. This is why I started Dust, to provide a more modern transport layer for bypassing current censorship methods. I really believe we can make something which is undetectable and thus cannot be throttled or blocked. I think information theory is on our side here and that this is a war we can win.

However, Egypt raised the bar yet again by simply unplugging the Internet. This is remarkable as it not only shows how much farther censors are willing to go now, but also how the nature of online freedom of speech has changed. One of the classic examples we used to use to discuss the purpose of Freeenet was that China blocked access to CNN. This seems like a comically naive goal now. People aren't trying to access news from major publishers. They're organizing protests via Twitter. This is totally decentralized content, it's peer-to-peer communication.

Unfortunately, this isn't a software fix. If the cables aren't plugged in, there's no clever ways we can encode the data to get it past the censors. This particular situation is a hardware problem. The infrastructure is centralized in such a way that it's easy for the government of a country to just switch it off and so this is what happened. Some respected individuals have called for the building of a new Internet without these problems.

I think this is a very noble endeavor, but I want to be straight with you about the problems with this idea. Essentially, we've tried this and it doesn't work. We've been trying this for ten years. Building an Internet out of Wifi mesh points is like wiring a city for electricity using USB cables. The 3G and 4G wireless Internet that we have now is connected by a high speed wired backbone and this is what makes it work well. There are many problems with a entirely mesh network, but the primary one is range. Once you start looking at coverage areas and doing the math you quickly discover that the number of mesh nodes required to cover any decent areas is astronomical, particularly because you need to connect out to the larger Internet either by crossing the border to a friendly nation or connecting to a satellite link.

There is something we can do, though. We can design a custom network for these situations which, while it doesn't connect to the general Internet, provides network connectivity to people on the ground with each other. Here's a brief overview of my design:

Femtocells are superior to Wifi access points here. The computing device of choice is going to be the camera and GPS-equipped phone, not the laptop. Phones are used to drifting from tower to tower. They have hand-off protocols for switching towers seamlessly. That's why you can talk on the phone while driving down the highway. A femtocell is essentially a "fake" cellular phone tower that intercepts your phone signals and routes them over your own network connection instead of the phone company backbone. You normally get these to improve reception in areas with poor or non-existent tower coverage. Places like, for instance, Egypt right now.

My proposal is to combine portable, battery-powered femtocells with a custom backend that, instead of routing your data packets over an ethernet connection, stores the data for exchange on a store-and-forward mesh network, much as in the FidoNet network referred to in the Rushkoff article. Then, instead of having fixed towers and moving phones we have moving towers.

This is all kind of technical, I suppose, so let me break it down for you in terms of a use case. You're in Egypt and you want to get news about what's going on, send out videos of important happenings to the world, and organize with your fellow citizens to take political action. You have a phone with a camera and text and MMS messaging. There are mobile cell phone towers roaming around the city. (This is something you'd need to organize and is a whole issue in itself, but some people specialize in this kind of theory. It's solvable.) When you come in range of an access point, you can send text and MMS messages. You also receive any that have been sent to you. The access point is actually another citizen with a backpack femtocell and battery. They could be walking, although I've also seen a similar plan executed using motorcycles. The tower stores your sent messages. The towers move in such a pattern that they come into range of each other. At this point they exchange stored messages. When a tower comes in range of a phone for which it has stored messages, it sends them to the phone and then deletes them. Sending messages to people in your phone contact list works the same as always. Getting information out of the country just requires sending a text or MMS message to someone that is known to have a satellite, dial-up, or other link outside. Once the information moves through the mesh to them, they can send it on.

I think this is the right way to do decentralized mesh networking in situations like what is happening now in Egypt. This is something we can build right now. I'm ready to start on this whenever you are. The first step is that we're going to need some femtocells. After that, it becomes a software problem again, like hacking a Wifi router to run OpenWRT.

If this is a topic you're interested in, I will be giving a talk about this on March 11 at the Dorkbot SXSW event: The Vision of the Future: 2021. Come by and say hi and we can figure out how to make this happen.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Like many web developers I've become interesting in the recent developments in HTML5. Web browsers can now do things they've never been able to do and it's an exciting time. It's also an exciting time for games right now. Two phenomena in game development have arisen which make game development fun again: retro games and indie games, although they are often found in conjunction. Retro games use the old school 8-bit graphics and sound we loved when we were kids. Some of these retro titles are from studios such as the new Megaman games or Cave Story for the Wii. There has also been a rising tide of indie games such as Minecraft and the games of the Humble Indie Bundle such as Braid. Some of these have retro graphics and some like Machinarium have pretty nice art. Not to save that low resolution art isn't nice, "pixel art" has become its own genre with its own talented artists. Some of these indie games have actually been quite successful with both Minecraft and the Humble Indie Bundle raising millions of dollars in sales.

I think the simultaneous rise of HTML5, the retro style, and the commercial success of the indie development methodology have created a great opportunity for the hacker turned entrepreneur. Additionally, all of the open source code, DIY tools, and Creative Commons licensed artwork provide a relatively low barrier to entry. Take, for instance, Realm of the Mad God. This is a really fun retro indie MMO. It was actually developed as part of a contest where artists first made Creative Commons licensed art assets and programmers then used these to make a game. The map generation code is also open source. You could go out and write a game like this today and, even better, you don't have to do it in Flash like they did. A game like this could be written in pure HTML/CSS/Javascript, which is good news for web developers that have already been working in this medium for a while.

My plan is to write a series of posts about all of the great things I've discovered about developing retro indie HTML5 games as I've been working on my own game. While this may seem like a very specific topic, it opens up the doors to a variety of topics with nice concrete examples. For instance, I've often wondered, HTML5 sounds cool I guess but what is it good for, actually? In developing my game, it became quite apparent that it would be pretty much impossible without some very specific HTML5 features, not the obvious things like the Canvas and Audio APIs, but specifically Web Workers have been indispensable.

So watch the blog for future posts in this series. I'm going to start with Akihabara, the HTML5 game library specifically designed for retro games. Also let me know if there's anything specific you're interested in it and if I something to share on the subject then I'll try to make a post about it.